This is a webpage written by high school teachers for those who teach world history and want to find online content as well as technology that you can use in the classroom.

Friday, January 3, 2014

British Education Secretary: WWI was Noble and Just Cause

Understanding diverse interpretations of history is what makes the subject interesting. Often there are no clear answers. But Michael Gove, Secretary of Education in Britain and pictured above, believes that World war 1 is an exception.

Gove seems to think that there is only one way to look at World War I. He believes that the Germans caused the war and that liberal historians distort that view and that movies like "Oh! What a Lovely War," and "The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder" are "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite."

Gove argues further that the war was " a noble cause" and a "just cause." He adds, "the ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified."

Historian, Sir Richard Evans, responded to Gove by saying, "How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism that put Germany in the shade and sponsored pogroms in 1903-6.”